Senate RINOS Too Busy Scolding Trump To Pass Voter ID Bill

It’s too bad Senate RINOs aren’t as passionate about election integrity as they are about tying the hands of the nation’s commander-in-chief.

But here we go again. 

On Tuesday, four GOP senators stood with Democrats in voting for a House resolution telling President Donald Trump to remove U.S. military personnel from the war (“ceasefire”) in Iran. The resolution is, like most things in Congress, performative — a symbolic congressional directive that Trump has no obligation to follow. The president effectively told Congress to go pound Iranian sand. 

In a Truth Social post late Tuesday, Trump insisted he has “Iran on the ropes.” 

“[A]nd the US Senate decides to have a poorly timed and meaningless War Powers Act vote, telling the number one sponsor of terror in the world that the United States doesn’t like what I am doing to them, and I must stop, and by so doing has provided aid and comfort the enemy,” he wrote. 

And he wasn’t shy about sharing his dissatisfaction with the four “Republicans Losers [who] voted with the Dumocrats.”  

“These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or the other, because I always get it done!” The president added. 

He expressed similar disappointment following House passage of the resolution earlier this month, with the assistance — again — of four Republicans, including Kentucky grandstander Thomas Massie.

“The Democrats are fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome. They would rather have our Country fail than give me another, of many, victories,” the president wrote in early June. “The four Republicans, that’s a whole other story — They’re GRANDSTANDERS! They should be ashamed of themselves.”

As always, you can’t get blood from a turnip, and you won’t find shame in the shameless. 

The resolution is mostly “meaningless.” The Democrats’ universally reviled Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the usual suspects in corporate media insist the resolution’s passage “sends a powerful message to the White House.” 

It doesn’t. It does, however, send a powerful message to conservative voters tired of a feckless GOP-controlled Senate. Once again, Senate RINOs have shown that they’re more interested in scolding the president than fighting for his signature election integrity package. 

Selling Out The SAVE America Act 

The senators — Rand Paul, Ky., Susan Collins, Maine,  Lisa Murkowski ,Alaska, and Bill Cassidy, La., voted last week to move the resolution to the floor before siding once more with Democrats on Tuesday. Dem Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., a better “moderate” than some of the worst RINOs in Congress, joined the rest of the Senate Republicans present in voting against the measure. 

Paul has been consistently adamant that the president should not have acted in Iran without congressional approval. 

To be sure, the war has been well received by neocons, not so much by many in the MAGA movement. As The Federalist’s Skye Graham reported this week, a new CBS News poll found 78 percent of voters surveyed want the war in Iran to end now, compared to 22 percent who said the war should continue until Iran makes wider concessions. The poll shows 60 percent of all Republicans —  56 percent of MAGA Republicans — want an end to hostilities. 

All that said, the vast majority of Americans support the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE America Act, but leadership in the Republican-controlled Senate don’t seem all that interested in passing it. 

Murkowski has been dead set against the SAVE America Act from the get-go. The extremely popular voter verification bill would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to vote in U.S. elections. Murkowski has been a perfect Democrat on the subject, using the same inane and fearmongering arguments as the left has in her opposition to legislation whose key component is supported by north of 80 percent of Americans.

Murkowski and Collins joined Trump haters Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and swamp creature Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in voting against a Senate measure in April that would have attempted to include the SAVE America Act in a budget bill through the reconciliation process, a lower passage threshold than the usual 60 votes required to end the filibuster.  

The same four voted with Democrats again earlier this month in blocking another Republican attempt to tie the election integrity package to a budget bill. 

‘Debate it Until it Passes’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and his leadership team have, at best, offered half-hearted efforts to get the SAVE America Act across the finish line. In March, Republicans launched a pathetic attempt to hold the floor to encourage Democrats to give in. It proved as lame as Thune’s leadership. The charade quickly fell apart. 

Conservatives including Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., have called for nuking the filibuster to pass the elections reform bill. They, and Paul, have pushed the idea of at least taking a Senate test vote to call Democrats’ bluff, believing that Dems will kill the filibuster as soon as they’re back in power. 

Thune recently insisted again that he doesn’t have the votes in his conference to go nuclear. 

“The only way you can get … this done is to nuke the legislative filibuster, and that is not something that we have anywhere close to the votes to do,” Thune recently told host Bret Baier on Fox News’ Special Report.

He has said the same about the “talking filibuster,” which would force Democrats to continuously debate the bill to prevent a vote on breaking the filibuster. The tactic would require senators to work more than 3 1/2 days a week, a nonstarter for many. 

Saving the SAVE Act better be a priority for the Senate’s GOP majority or they well could lose the power Trump delivered for them in 2024’s election. 

Political analyst and pollster Matt Towery told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Tuesday night that the SAVE Act is what will save the Republican Party. 

“And they better get on the ball or they’ll be the ones who cost us the midterms,” Towery said. 

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, last week told Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream that the Senate needs to be willing “to do the hard work to make sure” the bill passes.

“If we put it on the floor tomorrow and we announce that we’re going to debate it until it passes, I’m confident that we can get there,” the senator said. 

For some RINOs like Murkowski, Collins, and Tillis, hard work is for punching the president, not protecting elections. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.